You can read the full article by clicking here, but we have included a couple of quotes below:
“When Jamie Halse first pitched the idea of a Japan small-cap activism fund to his then-employer Platinum Asset Management in 2016, the concept may have been ahead of its time or simply waiting for the structural conditions to catch up.
A decade on, those conditions have arrived.
The combination of government-driven corporate governance reform, the long unwinding of Japan’s notorious cross-shareholding structures and a generational shift in corporate culture has created what Halse describes as a genuinely target-rich environment for shareholder activism.”
“The structural reasons why Japanese small-caps trade so cheaply run deep. Many companies sit at a discount to the value of the cash and real estate on their balance sheets, before ascribing any value to the operating business.
This is partly the legacy of the bubble era: companies that levered-up in the late 1980s emerged from the subsequent crash deeply risk-averse, accumulating assets rather than investing in their core businesses. That conservatism, Halse notes, has been slow to wash through.”
